maniac

I'm not normally an advocate of the 'compensation culture' but if there's genuine neglegence and it's caused you an injury then yes you should claim. You should not suffer any penalty at work because of it, and it should remain confidential between you and the school so colleagues need never know if you're worried about backlash from them. The school will have insurance to cover them against accidents in the work place so won't suffer financially themselves. A lot of it depends on whether the school was aware of the broken step and how long it had been like that and a whole load of other things.

Don't think it will - AUX is an input, not an output. You need to find the headphone output on the Cmedia card, and then work out how to make the jack plug on the PC work with it. There's a chance the 6 pin plug is a 'loop through' one with a microswitch in which cuts the sound to the rear jack plug when a headphone jack is inserted. If you can isolate which cables in the 6-pin plug are the sound input, you should be able to make it work with the 4-pin plug on the C-media card. I expect you'll only need 3 cables to be hooked up as the 4 pin output probably has 2 grounds, but the headphone plug only needs one. (That sort of makes sense I hope.)

I'm not actually anywhere near my network at the moment, but if I remember when I am then I'll copy the relevant bit. It is actually already posted on here in more than one post, as people have asked me for it before. It's very simple, just 4 or 5 lines of VBS code for every program you want to distribute icons for this way, essentialy 'If EXE exists then check to see if icon's already copied and if it isn't then copy it' repeated for each program - only take seconds to run thou. We also have a 'common' set of icons which gets copied to every workstation which has all the icons for things like MS office etc. and we also have another section of script which lets me distribute icons by OU - I use this when I know the same software is on every machine in an area as it's more efficient as it copies them in one block. Most of my startup script is to do with startmenu and desktop icon management.

Teacher: 'I know I should put it on the helpdesk, but . . . .' Me: 'I'm going to stop you right there, if it's not urgent then please stick it on the helpdesk' Must say that several times a week.

We use a local folder on the c:\ for start menu and desktop re-direction and a custom written startup script which only copies down the necessary icons for that machine by looking for the relevant executables on the C:\ . The Brilliant thing about this is if we distribute a piece of software we've already setup to more workstations, we don't have to mess with the start menus as the script sorts it all out for us. Works well for us and has done for the last 2 years. The script could easily be modified to remove shortcuts if you un-install software as well, although I've never bothered with this as we rarely remove software from workstations once we've installed it. EDIT: For dealing with un-avalable network programs I did used to use a simple VBS script 'launcher' which checked for the programs availability first, if it wasn't available then it simply gave you a message saying the program couldn't be run, but if it was then it ran it as normal. However I don't have any software which runs from network shares now so it became redundant.

Well as an overpaid marketing guru at camelot once said, you've got to be in it to win it, so I've just brought a ticket for the hell of it.

No it's fixed for 5 years, it's a 35 year mortgage. I'll re-mortgage at the end of the 5 years and probably reduce the term.

Bag?? What bag?? I don't take one anywhere, everything I need is in my pockets or clipped to my belt.

I probably would, but it'd be a different sort of work probably freelance or self employed doing something different, where I can pick and chose what I do and when. I would not want to be tied to a 9-5 job anymore.

Get some very good financial advice, that's what I'd do. You'd think that it'd be easy to survive for the rest of your life with that sort of money, but handled wrongly and you'll be surprised. Yes you'll be OK for the first 10-20 years, but as soon as inflation catches up with you, if you've not invested at least some of it wisely you can quickly find yourself running short of money to sustain your new lifestyle.

I brought my first place in October last year. £115,000 was the accepted offer, 10% deposit and 5.5% fixed rate mortgage over 35 years, which sounds expensive considering the interest rates at the moment, but I'm hoping that I'll benefit if interest rates rise (which they will do eventually) I had no problems getting the mortgage, it was a very simple process. I'm lucky because this place was virtually derelict when I brought it so I've added value to the property by renovating it - the market in this area did rise, but has fallen again now slightly lower than it was when I brought the place. At the end of the day it only becomes a problem if you're looking to sell. If you do want to move and your property has lost too much value, a short term answer may be to rent it out if the rent will cover the mortgage plus 10%, and just rent a different place for yourselves. You'll still have the investement in the property you own, and you won't lose out financially if you rent somewhere that's equivalent value. 2 friends of mine have done exactly this rather than sell up at a loss.

They need to be tight, but if you over tighten them you will distort the pipe and it'll drip - it's only thin copper and is very easy to distort. Once you get it to that stage, no amount of tightening will stop it dripping, infact it can make it worse. There's no real way to describe how tight then should be - its something you have to be shown or learn yourself. I was taught by a friend of mine who's a gas fitter. Yeah never got on with those, despite being shown many times how to solder them properly, I just never get it right.

If it were me I'd have fixed it myself, plumbing isn't actually that difficult. The biggest mistake people make? Over tightening compression joints, that's when they leak. Here's my kitchen sink just after I'd plumbed it in - No leaks, nice straight pipework and only took me about an hour. http://i76.photobucket.com/albums/j29/mredman/Misc/IMG_9723.jpg As for the OP question, I wouldn't have paid them if they left it like that, simple as.

I could see more and more schools combining together to share technical and other support staff like Grounds people, maintenance people etc. to make it more affordable.

We had a JAZZ drive on the 'media' computer when I was at school. The same computer also had a duel speed CD writer, 2.6GB hard drive, video capture card and a whopping 128MB of RAM and was based on a Pentium 133MHz processor. This was cutting edge stuff at the time, and I remember it apparently cost about £3000 for the school to buy and was pretty much obsolete within 3 years. We did have a lot of fun with it as the video software we had could do croma key, and we managed to talk the media teacher into letting us paint one whole wall of the room blue so we could use it!

We have a clock in the top corner from ClockLink.com - Free Flash World Clock and the BBC news on an RSS feed across the bottom.

Sounds very simelar to the way Xibo works, except you're hosting the backend system where as Xibo is hosted locally but is still web based. A lot of schools are starting to use xibo as the system requirements are quite modest, and it will run powerpoint presentations which means teachers and other staff members can easily create content for it and I can upload it to the displays with the minimum of changes in 2 minutes flat.

I use the metoffice one you can customise it for your area. Met Office: Weather Widgets follow the steps, then copy and paste the code into an HTML document, save it somewhere Xibo can read it from and insert it into a layout as a webpage - Works well for me. I've got a clock and weather update on our reception screen both of them inserted in this way. Mike.

You could have had those 2 weeks - the fact they won't have read the letter until 2 weeks later is irrelevant as long as you sent it in the mail so there is a post mark on the envelope to date the letter with, you notice period starts from that date. You don't need any 'acceptance' of a notice to leave your employement if you give the proper notice period - state in the letter the last date you will be working with your current employer so there is no arguement. Employers are able to be flexible with notice periods, but stating that they want a letter from your new employer before entering into negotiations with you is taking things a bit far - your new job is none of their business, and negotiations should be with you and the school over this, your new employer should have absolutely nothing to do with it. Mike.

Somewhere in a box at home I still have one of these: http://api.ning.com/files/Kc4I9NA-hvDf-Op7NZj7AcHD0u7CJImyaonuvNH73mbawZcllRxXAmjRUzhPN2aS0u19TaRmhmquLKlw7T1T6Dy7oIjqF2hy/Original_IBM_PS2.jpg Which belonged to my very first PC, which was one of these http://www.mikewalder.com/mcm/ps2-60.jpg Which had an 80286 processor with a whopping 1MB of RAM and 60Mb HDD. In physical size that hard drive was huge - a full 5 1/4 inchs across and double height! You can get laptop computers smaller than that now with 1000 times the storage!

Profiles can be the most annoying and confusing things. As far as I can remember if there's already a local profile on the machine and a mandatory profile specified in AD, the mandatory profile is merged into the local profile at login, so any of the settings defined by the mandatory profile are enforced together with the content of the local profile. To stop the build up of local data on the machines you will need to make sure all local profiles are cleared off the machine at logoff. There's several ways you can do this - I use the VBS script below as a start up script to clear out the documents and settings folders on XP. It's a bit crude as it still leaves traces of the profiles in the registry, but removes all the files. It was written by someone else on here I believe, but I can't recall who. On Error Resume Next Dim obtainfolder Dim Pathfinder Dim strPath Set fso = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject") strPath = "C:\Documents and Settings\" userexcludelist = "Administrator,All Users,Default User,localservice,networkservice," Set f = fso.GetFolder(strPath) ' Loop through all subfolders For Each fldrItem in f.SubFolders fldrName = fldrItem.name If Right(strPath,1) <> "\" Then Pathfinder = strPath & "\" & fldrName Else Pathfinder = strPath & fldrName End If If InStr(1, userexcludelist, fldrName, 1) Then Else set obtainfolder = fso.GetFolder(Pathfinder) obtainfolder.Delete true End If Next ' Clean up objects Set fso = Nothing Set fc = Nothing You can also try installing the userhive cleanup service and turning on the options in Group Policy to delete local profiles at logoff, although I've not had a lot of success with this. You can also run Delprof from a script which is more through but takes a while to run sometimes depending on the size of profiles it's having to delete. Mike.

I have used a product from Viglen before which was based on the Avantis virtual CD server. However this was back in the days when hard drives on workstations were much smaller so you couldn't do full installations of programs like Encarta which were commonly used at the time, so the only realistic way of running such software was to use a CD server. I've not used one for a long time however, anything which requires a shared resource is served from a network share or a normal file server, and most programs are done as full installs so won't need the installation media or CD to be present. Virtual CD servers are pretty much redundant technologies now in my opinion, unless there's a very specific reason for needing them. Mike.

A good friend of my dads likes his steak pretty much blue. As he says, knock it's horns off, wipe it's a**e and stick it on a plate. Me personally I like medium rare, but often order rare because they are always overcooked. Best steak I've ever had was in a little pub in the new forest, they cooked it perfectly and it was a really nice steak with a lot of flavour. One guy in the place was complaining about it because it had a strong flavour and he insisted the meat was off - poor bloke had obviously never had a decent steak before. I felt sorry for the chef trying to explain that's how it's supposed to taste, and your average supermarket or wholesale brought meat just doesn't taste the same.

It's times like these when I'm quite pleased I don't have a TV able to receive transmissions, I don't miss it one little bit. I shall of course not be watching it, I'll probably be out somewhere doing some photography, taking advantage of the extra day off.

My kettle does, but it has a slight leak and has done for at least the last 3 years, still works thou.